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Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought
(www.freethink.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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It'll be reasonably expensive, but sequencing and gene alteration is way cheaper than in needs to be.
If this can actually cure cancers, it may even be worth it.
The thing is, surely there's antibody against cancer antigens anyway, in ordinary cancer. A cancer cell expresses epitopes not on healthy cells.
Why is this better?
...what? this sounds like you're advocating for price increases.
Oops, new to Lemmy. But not new to typing, so no excuse.
I meant than "it used to be".
I blame autocorrect.
It's not better, ideally the body finds and eliminates cancer cells all by itself. Just like it does with viruses or infection. It happens all the time, most of the time you'd never know it happened
What this does is hardcore the "solution" into your immune cells. It tells them exactly what antibody to build, and spams that knowledge, so your immune cells are loaded up and ready to use that antibody
Yeah like we have cancerous cells in our bodies all the time, it's when our immune system isn't dealing with them that it becomes a growth or tumor.
Exactly. And ideally not just cells growing out of control, cancerous or not. Senescent cells that no longer perform their function too - they all have bio markers that are missed.
If we could buff up elimination of cells no longer fulfilling their function, and introduce various revitalized stem cells? That's how you live to 200 baby. That's rejuvenation- it doesn't fix plaque in your arteries or structural defects, but I'm convinced it would buy you a lot of time, alongside treating the symptoms
And that gives you plenty of time for us to figure out the biomorphic field and gets you to eternal youth and body mods... That vein of science works on simple life, but mammals are complicated. It didn't take much to figure out amphibian xenobots, but we'll probably reach AI superintelligence before we figure out how to flesh sculpt with human tissue... We're a lot more delicate
I get this sounds insane to most people, but there's legit science behind my beliefs, and I can look up specific evidence on request... Just be specific with what you want further reading on, it's a complex topic
I think "reasonable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Whatever price they charge it will be to maximize to Moderna's profits - i.e. they'll price it slightly lower than what insurers / national health systems would be stung for what 44% of melanoma patients needing a second round of expensive chemo would cost them but not so high that no one will cover the treatment. So I guess the price is "reasonable", in that it'll be cheaper than the alternative but it's not like Moderna will be charitable or fair about it.
It's still an amazing breakthrough though.
Yeah you see this with a lot of monoclonal antibody treatments that private companies develop. They price them insanely high to recoup the insane research costs, a lot of them have reimbursement programs for patents who couldn't afford to take the drug, or who's insurance can't cover all of the drug, because they want a patient base as it adds value for their product. What happens in sane countries is you have healthcare boards negotiating prices with drug manufacturers to bring the cost down, and insurance or public plans covering what the most long-term cost effective and beneficial treatments are. Drug companies want to recoup their costs sunk in to research, and they want a patient base that can affirm the validity of the product.
Where I have a major problem is when private companies benefit from publicly funded research, or for private drug manufacturers who are merely producing single-molecule or bio-similar compounds for generic labels. IMO generic drug production should be publicly owned, as should products developed using public research grants. I would also do away with private insurance and tax schemes and use market simulation models to determine costs and efficiencies within a publicly owned framework. Small private specialty clinics I would maintain as well as research grants to private research but bringing the drug to market would be socialized and the private research institution reimbursed through that. Any essential, standardized treatments, would effectively be delivered in a fully socialized way, with smaller specialty areas being more economically "free" but in service to the broader socialized model.